THE San Francisco Bay Bridge-Revisited

A good friend came into town from Seattle, WA on business but also had a little time to do some photography. I met Todd M. on my trip to Moab, UT back at the end of August 2011.

One of the pictures that I have taken in the past that is a favorite to many people who have seen it is my San Francisco Bay Bridge picture. Todd wanted one for himself.

He arrived on Monday and we were excited to go capture it with some sunset colors. When we arrived and parked on treasure island, the wind was blowing and the fog started to cover some of the key iconic buildings of the San Francisco skyline. We looked at out iPhones to see what the weather was going to be like over the next few days. It appears that the weather was going to be warmer and clearer on Wednesday. We both agreed to try again on Wednesday.

Tuesday night I was glued to the news channels. The weather people were saying that there was going to be an off shore flow. This means the fog will not be able to roll in and it is going to be warmer. The conditions were looking good.

Wednesday was here and it was clear in the morning. All day I was looking out my office window to see if there was any hint of fog rolling in. None! The plan was for Todd to come up to my office as soon as possible because there was going to be some heavy traffic trying to get onto the bay bridge in order for us to park on the treasure island side. My cousin, Spencer, was working in the city and managed to come out and join us.

It was a bit of a rush. Sunset was at 6:18 pm. We parked at 6:05pm. We had to walk to the site which took about 10-15 minutes. When we got to the area I took the picture from, the sun had already set behind the skyline of San Francisco. This was fine because when the sun is still up in the sky, the scene is too bright.

We set up and started shooting away. One thing I learned from Todd and his buddy, Jon G., was to use my iPhone to take pictures of what I’m taking because the iPhone can sometimes take better pictures! Also, you can send the pictures via picture texting or what we do is use the app, Whatsapp.

While taking pictures with our professional cameras and our iPhones, we started shooting pictures via whatsapp to each other while we were crouching on the side of the hill. My iphone started to make the boing sounds alerting me a text or something arrived. I yelled out stop bothering me I’m busy! We laughed and continued to shoot pics to each other via Whatsapp.